It would be difficult to determine what influence if any Pirandello had on the modern existentialists. However, there can be no doubt that he must be considered a precursor of the modern literary men who propound this philosophy. Thomas Bishop and Erminio G. Neglia both note that Pirandello exemplifies much of the chaos, anxiety, grief and absurdity so central to existential thought [Bishop, Pirandello and the French Theater, 1960; Neglia, Pirandello y la dramática rioplatense, 1970]. Pirandello himself has said [in his essay "On Humor"] that "life is a changing equilibrium, a continuous awakening and slumbering of feelings, tendencies and ideas. It is an incessant fluctuation between contradictory terms, an oscillation between opposite poles: hope and fear, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, and so on." Even Sartre praised Pirandello as one of the world's most important dramatists, saying that he was well ahead of his times in much of his writings [Sartre, "A Paris et Ailleurs," Les Nouvelles littéraires, April 24, 1952].

Existentialism distinguishes between essence (what a thing is) and existence (that it is). Existence precedes essence. A man is before he is something. He exists before he defines himself. Within this atmosphere of existing there is freedom, common in Sartre's plays, for example, to control and decide how one will act in this world. One must decide continually the course of action in daily existence. In the process of existing, one is constantly developing one's essence. This creation of essence only stops at death. Likewise, death is the final act of freedom, as seen in Sartre, for the ultimate of existence is to be able to accept death with mental strength and fortitude.

That existence precedes essence seems to be an underlying premise of Pirandello's short fiction. Certainly his short stories are not exactly like Beckett's or Sartre's whose settings always evoke more a condition humaine than a specific locale, but in Pirandello's stories one is always keenly aware of the relativity of all systems, whether religious, philosophical, social or personal.

But if relativity and a denial of a priori essence are constants in his stories, Pirandello always locates them in a particular place with many different character types, thereby avoiding an abstract, philosophical kind of story such as Beckett's "Watt." Pirandello delights in portraying life concretely, the way it appears to the senses. For Pirandello, man is an animal who rationalizes about the circumstances in which he finds himself and this is precisely the point at which his art takes its cue, portraying characters in a complex social context (invariably Sicily) and showing their thoughts, ideals, rationalizations and hopes.

In the process of determining the essential aspects of Pirandello's art, Adriano Tilgher, in his seminal article "Life Versus Form" [in Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1967], has attempted to expound perhaps the central theme in Pirandello's work, namely, how thought arises from the Pirandellian, and existential, flow of life. Tilgher begins his essay by asking what distinguishes man from nature in Pirandello's view, and he concludes: "This, and only this: that man lives and feels himself live, while the other beings of nature just live, live purely and simply." For Pirandello, life rises to thought or consciousness in man, pours itself into stiff modes of thought, and then becomes our concepts and ideals. Pirandello himself has said the following:

Life is a continuous flow which we continually try to stop, to fix in established and determinate forms outside and inside of ourselves because we are already fixed forms, forms that move among other immovable ones, which follow the flow of life until the point when they become rigid and their movement, slowed, stops. The forms in which we try to stop and fix this continuous flow are the concepts, the ideals, within which we want to keep coherent all the fictions we create, the condition and the status in which we try to establish ourselves. ["On Humor"]

These rigid forms, as a result of our concepts and ideals, become the conventions, mores, traditions and laws of society. These forms are relative to the incomprehensible, and possibly absurd, flow of life. Tilgher concludes that Pirandello's art exemplifies the idea that life in its infinite "nakedness and freedom," is quite impossible to enjoy outside of the preconstructed (or perhaps existentially predetermined) forms into which society, history and individual existence have been channeled.

Now, within the philosophical atmosphere of existentialism regarding existence preceding essence, and the Tilgherian theory regarding the rigidity of form and flow of Pirandellian life, it will be shown, upon the discussion of several short stories, that these two elements are delicately and artistically interwoven in Pirandello's works of even lesser importance.

In the short story "The Jar" we find Lollo Zirafa, a wealthy farmer who has a notorious reputation for filing law suits against people, and commonly losing them. Within the absurdity of this jurisprudential fiasco, he has great anxiety regarding the forthcoming olive harvest, which has every indication of being one of the best ever. He decides he will purchase a new giant jar, one large enough to hold the bumper crop. Almost immediately after its arrival, however, Zirafa finds it broken and consequently enlists the aid of a handy-man named Licasi to mend it. Licasi claims to have a secret cement that would repair the jar so well that people could barely discern the hairline fracture. Zirafa insists that Licasi also rivet the jar to ensure that the jar hold oil. Over Licasi's protests, Zirafa has his way, but poor Licasi, in the process of wiring, riveting and cementing the broken piece, has sealed himself into the vessel. After consulting his legal advisor, Zirafa is left in a perplexing and absurd dilemma. Licasi refuses to pay for the destruction of the jar in getting him out. He says he would rather stay there than pay. Both individuals seem to be possessed and belligerent within their own structured mental and societal forms.

That night Zirafa sees his farm workers dancing and singing around the jar, drinking wine and looking like demons. This is most symbolical of the incomprehensible flux of life. In his rage Zirafa runs out to the jar and kicks it down a hill. When it strikes a tree it breaks, thereby freeing Licasi. The story thus represents two conceptions, or forms, which collide quite irrationally, or absurdly, causing the senseless and symbolic destruction of an artifact, itself a symbol of the objectification of life (existence) into rigid, crystalized form. Within this form, there is destruction of character and a chaos of warring forces. This, thematically, is quite existential.

In "The Jar" neither Zirafa nor Licasi understand each other's thought structures; they are both rather unperceptive. But for Pirandello even the "perceptive" human being's insights and determinations are seen to be subjectively absurd. In the delightful story "It's Nothing Serious" he takes for his protagonist a young sophisticate who displays considerable ability to see through the surface reality of things to the more elementary primitive levels of everyday existence. Pirandello's portrait of Perazzetti may even be something of a self-parody.

In "It's Nothing Serious," Perazzetti is an intellectual and he plays an amusing mental game that often causes him to laugh in public for no apparent reason. His game is to realize that there is the "Cave of the beast" in us all and so he tries to guess which beast belongs in which cave—whether, absurdly, it be a turkey or another kind of animal. His game, or form, extends one level higher, however. When he meets someone whose higher civilized functions he finds intolerably stuffy and illmannered, he imagines that person, absurdly enough, squatting, performing that function that marks us all as unavoidably animals.

There are certain times when Perazzetti is not himself though; times when this laughter mechanism is suppressed. This invariably happens when he is in love, and since he has been engaged six times already, that is quite often. After his last engagement, which ended when he noticed disturbing resemblance between his fiancee and her brother, Perazzetti decides to marry Filomena, an idiot girl. He then sends her to the country to be well cared for, agreeing with his friends that it will cause him some distress. But he argues that that pain will be a blessing for it "will mean that I have fallen in love once more, so deeply in love as to be prepared to commit the greatest of stupidities, that of taking a wife." When his friends reply that he already has a wife, he responds that that was nothing serious.

Perazzetti thus married to protect himself from the danger of taking a wife. This story is an example of thought rising from the irrational flow of life, into the mind of a young man. The humor of the story arises from his ultimate solution deviating from social norm—one usually marries the woman one loves. What is even more ironical, however, is that Perazzetti, the one who espoused the bestial theory of life, actually divorces himself from that elemental source through the use of intellect. Perazzetti, the rational mind par excellence (at least between love affairs), dooms himself to live apart from the source of vitality—and love. Perazzetti's solution is a deadening intellectual form and although he may be able to maintain a certain comic distance from reality, his laughter is doomed to become sadness. There is opposition between Perazzetti, the individual, and his image as construed by others. The rigidity of societal structure has forced him to take a wife, but he has done this only to in reality avoid the norm, or societal demand. The intellectual level of Perazzetti as opposed to Zirafa, for example, is most distinct. However, the existential atmosphere and rigidity of form seem to be rather similar.

Such stultifying thought-structures occur in other than intellectuals in Pirandello's stories. For example, in "Sicilian Honour," Pirandello examines the effect that the objectification of honor can have. The story concerns itself with the trial of Saru Argentu, a Sicilian farmer accused of murdering his wife. Although he believes himself to be completely innocent, because he killed his wife for having an affair, under questioning by the judge it is learned that Saru had known of his wife's affair for a long time. He had absurdly known that his wife was prostituting herself; he even encouraged it. Often he would send word home that he would be coming home early, so that his wife had time to get rid of her client. The reason he had killed her, then, is because the incident had become public—because his honor had been impeached.

To Saru, this was justification enough to bury a hatchet in his wife's skull.

In all three stories so far discussed, we have seen that destructive things can happen when a form becomes an obsession. Pirandello, however, does not judge his characters. For even in Saru Argentu his purpose is to examine the complexity, often the incongruities, of consciousness as it rises mysteriously from that existential undercurrent of flux. Certainly to Argentu, he was perfectly justified in killing his wife, and he feels no guilt at all. Saru is not an intellectual per se, as Perazzetti, yet he too is trapped by a form so rigid as to cause his obsession and ultimate death of his wife.

In the story "The Husband's Revenge," Pirandello presents another way still within the framework of existentialism, the forms can arise to affect behavior of people. In this unique case it is a wife's memory of her husband which becomes crystallized into an obsession. A young man named Bartolino is betrothed to a young widow, Carolina. She asks him if he would refer to her as "Lina," as did her first husband; also that they honeymoon in Rome, as she had done with her first husband, and also that they sleep in the same hotel—and even the same room! After the honeymoon, poor Bartolino comes to realize the extent of his new wife's obsession with her former husband. She talks constantly about him, how he did this or that, how he in fact formed her. Bartolino by this time has become obsessed himself with a photograph of her deceased husband in which he is smiling pleasantly and tipping his hat.

Almost in an absurd kind of self-defense, Bartolino decides to have an affair with a recently widowed woman named Ortensia, who, coincidentally, lives nearby. His scheme is easily carried out, since it was Ortensia's wish as well. But as he lies in her bed, he notices a shining object on the floor. He picks up the gold locket with the intuition of giving it back to her, but as he sits waiting for her, he opens it. Inside, he sees a miniature copy of the troubling photograph of Cosimo, still smiling and tipping his hat. And so Cosimo, although he is absurdly dead, continues his influence beyond the grave, first embodied in his wife's obsession with his memory, and secondly, in the effect that that memory has on Bartolino.

Pirandello, in this short fiction, delights in presenting such wry occurrences objectively, with form, underlined with existential absurdity, without editorial comment or authorial intrusion. He does not always present reality as mildly grotesque, or ironic in this way, however.

In the short story "The Captive," Pirandello creates a tale of exceeding beauty and tenderness. Vice Guarnotta, a well-liked and wealthy old man, is abducted from his holdings at the edge of the sea. On the way, he had been thinking that the "Whole world was now as lonely as that highway and his own life grey as that twilight." He had lost his only son and he had sworn to wear black for the rest of his life. Within this existential harshness, he is always thinking about how intolerably boring life is. At this very moment he is abducted.

He awakens to find himself bound with ropes in a cave. When the kidnappers, one of whom Vice recognizes as Manuzza, demand a ransom of three thousand florins, he tells them that he would have to sell everything he owns, something that he would have to do for himself. He also adds that his nephews and nieces would not help because if he were dead, they would inherit the money. Vice then suggests quite honestly, that if they would let him free, he would sell everything he had and give it to them, and he promises he would not reveal their identity. The amateurish bandits vote against this and thereby find themselves in a predicament since they do not want to kill the old man; and neither can they set him free for fear that he might tell somebody. Within the absurdity of the kidnapping, even the bandits are caught in an existential dilemma, namely, a confrontation with the societal form of "law" and honor. They finally decide to keep Vice incarcerated in the cave for the rest of his life.

As the months go by, Vice realizes that keeping him supplied with food and water is a burden on these men. This is compounded by the fact that one of three must always guard him, while the other two work. Gradually he develops a fatherly love for the men, meets their wives, and frolics with his "grandchildren." He totally forgets his past life with its intolerable boredom. One day, however, as he is playing with the children, he collapses on the ground dead. As for the kidnappers: "during the rest of their lives, if anyone happened to mention Vice in their presence and speak of his mysterious disappearance, they would say: He was a saint that man . . . I'm sure he was admitted to paradise."

In a sense, the bandits, absurdly enough, had done Vice a favor. Vice had been obsessed with the loss of his own son and nothing brought him happiness—neither his wife nor his possessions. His oath to wear black for the rest of his life indicates the extent of his servitude to the memory of his son. In this story, through a series of blunders by amateur kidnappers, a man is actually delivered into happiness. As those men came to replace his lost son, Vice is given back to the life of feeling, and deciding, and consequently he enjoys his last days immensely.

It can be seen here that Pirandello is not a naive nihilist. He has the ability to see all of reality. Indeed happiness is as much an objective fact of life as sorrow. For Pirandello, life is not simple, but an incomprehensible flow, a tapestry of infinite complexity. It rises mysteriously into forms or structures—either intellectual, as in Perazzetti's case, or from memory, as in "Lina's" case, or finally out of pragmatic need, as the jar in Zirafa's case. The form can also be social as in "Sicilian Honour." If men can seem existentially ludicrous because of life being poured into still molds, they can also occasionally be redeemed from them. Surely in Vice's case, although there is required an almost absurd series of coincidences, he is actually better in the cave-life than the one he was leading.

Curiously enough the two hundred fifty short stories of Pirandello have not been studied in depth. Of course, his drama has received most of the attention. Yet within the discussion of these five particular stories it has become evident that within an atmosphere of existentialism, coupled with the ever-present dichotomy between life and form, there is in Pirandello a delicate balance between these two elements. To this extent it is hoped that further light has been given to the ultimate aesthetics of Pirandello.